What’s the Value-Add of University?

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Personally, I didn’t find university more valuable than self-study.

However I have seen a value-add experienced by other students who wanted to go for a PhD.

It’s a lot easier to get into a PhD program when you have a stellar transcript from a well-known university along with stellar letters of rec from well-known academics.

If you just want the skills, then I don’t think university has much value-add, but if you also want the academic credibility and connections, then I think that’s where the value-add is.

I would say the same about early grad-level math like first-semester algebraic topology, but that’s about as far as I went into pure math in academia before fully switching over to applied math in industry, so it’s quite possible that the university setting becomes more helpful as you get close to the cutting edge.

I imagine that once you get to research-level math there are fewer and fewer self-study resources and those resources are less and less scaffolded, so there may be a crossover point at which university has an actual pedagogical value-add.

And if you get to that point then you probably need to find a research mentor anyway since you’re entering stage 3 in Bloom’s talent development process, and that research mentor would be a professional mathematician at a university.

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